Here is a battered sneaker box, tennis-court green. Inside of it are cassette tapes, their cases smudged and cloudy. Outside of it is a room in a second-floor apartment in Somerville, near Boston. Maybe there’s a desk here, with a spilling box of books beside it. Notebooks strewn about. A gray boombox nearby. And a […]
Tag: Literature & Film
Posted inEssay
The Unexplainable Residue of Silence
For Ramón Andrés, Spain’s most gifted contemporary writer on music, poetry is the hidden measure of his prose. In a recent article for VAN, he told me that whenever he wishes to express something with particular clarity and resonance, he writes in meter, in decasyllables. The result is prose of exact proportion, tempered and lucid, […]
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The Transcriber
Donde menos se piensa, salta la liebre—where you least expect it, the hare leaps. Sancho Panza’s proverb from the Second Part of Don Quijote conveys the suddenness with which insight can arrive. The hare leapt for me while reading Lydia Davis’s essay “Demanding Pleasures: On the Art of Observation” in Harper’s. Responding to the perennial […]